Could these concentric rings be the result of a collision during the Big Bang?

Gurzadyan and Penrose

US scientists say they have detected echoes of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, in a major discovery for understanding the origins of the universe.

The "first direct evidence of cosmic inflation" had been found with the help of a telescope at the South Pole, experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said.

The detection of these gravitational waves represents the last untested element of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, filling in a major gap in our understanding of how the universe was born.

The gravitational waves are ripples that move through space and time, and have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang".

Their detection confirms an integral connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

"Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today," said John Kovac, leader of the research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre.

"A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point."

The universe is too smooth; there's no way that the bits of the universe in one direction should know about the bits of the universe in the exact opposite direction; they are so far apart from each other that they should never have come in contact. And yet they look exactly the same.One explanation for this is that at the very, very beginning, the bits of the universe were all in contact and everything just sort of smoothed out, and then very, very early on, the universe expanded unbelievably rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.Take some tiny little speck of dust and stretch it out so it's the size of a small ball, and then let it go, and the universe has been expanding in a more well-behaved way ever since.

Bryan Gaensler, director of the Centre for All Sky Astrophysics at the University of SydneyListen to him on AM:

A radio telescope called BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) was used to detect the gravitational waves.

The telescope targeted a specific area of sky known as the Southern Hole outside the galaxy, where there is little dust and other galactic material to interfere with what humans can see with the potent sky-peering tool.

By observing the cosmic microwave background, or a faint glow left over from the Big Bang, small fluctuations gave scientists new clues about the conditions in the early universe.